Political Alchemy

Scientific truth is like gold. You can't manufacture it. So why, asks Molly Scott Cato of Green Audit, do politicians pretend they can?

In modern science Truth is a slippery concept. Decisions we make I about issues that affect our very survival must be based on truths that change from day to day. No wonder that citizens have lost faith in scientists' advice. The standing of scientists has never been lower. When Liam Donaldson, chief medical officer, advised people not to look at the eclipse amidst panic that large proportions of the population might suffer blindness, his opinions were greeted with barely concealed hilarity. The parade of scientific error proclaimed as Truth stretches back through GM food and BSE to nuclear safety.

The citizens of the UK have lost faith in the scientific establishment. According to a recent ICM poll public trust in scientists is now lower than their trust in policemen. Only 35 per cent of those questioned said they trusted scientists 'a lot'; 54 per cent trusted them 'a little'; and 12 per cent did not trust them at all. The only professions to come lower in the trust ranking were politicians and journalists. On specific issues levels of lack of trust rose as high as 49 per cent on the issue of cloning animals and 40 per cent on the issue of genetically modified food. [1]

ADVISORY STATUS

What is 'the best scientific advice' on which, we are reassuringly told, the Government bases its decisions? Is it any more reliable than the advert we read for crystal healing suggesting that the forces of quartz will remove tumours? Those without a scientific education are in no position to decide. We find ourselves increasingly seeing the world from the perspective of the innocent child observing holes in the sky.

Recent research reveals that our MPs may, in many cases, be scarcely better informed. On the basis of a questionnaire, backed up with data from The Vacher Dod Guide to the New House of Commons, Green Audit estimated that at least one third of all MPs are not scientifically or mathematically literate. About the same proportion probably do not even have O-level maths and may find themselves struggling with concepts such as ratios and percentages, never mind such technicalities as statistical significance of research findings or the interpretation of epidemiological results.

Green Audit looked in depth at the scientific expertise of the members of the Backbench Environment Committee, it being the one most closely involved with our central areas of concern. The table on page 42 gives some information about the members of the Committee, their qualifications and experience. The information on qualifications was not easy to obtain. Several members of the Committee objected to being questioned and one refused to answer. As far as we could ascertain on the basis of repeated phone calls, of the 11 members of the Committee, not a single one has a degree in either physics, chemistry or biology. There are two with A-level maths and one with A-level physics, none with post-O-level qualifications in chemistry or biological sciences.

Does this lack of scientific expertise on the part of our decision-makers matter? For many of the political decisions that have to be considered, perhaps not. But in a world that is increasingly affected by scientific and technological knowledge, those who are unable to understand basic scientific or mathematical concepts are at a great disadvantage. In particular, they are prisoners to advice which is given by scientifically literate civil servants, expert committees and lobbyists whose interests may be tied to transnational corporations. And such advice is increasingly biased towards permitting questionable or hazardous procedures and processes where the result is likely to increase profit or employment.

When defending her decision to grant the contract for the operation of the Aldermaston weapons plant to BNFL, Baroness Symons admitted that 'I have the humility to say that I am not a nuclear scientist, but there are those who are and who understand the reports in full. I have to rely on those with real expertise'. [2] The implicit assumption made is that these 'nuclear scientists' would be unbiased either as a consequence of their connections with the nuclear industry or following their education or experience in the field of nuclear physics. It is unlikely, for example, that Baroness Symons consulted experts whose provenance or background was with Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth, or the Nuclear Awareness Group in Reading, the town most likely to be affected by the operation of the plant.

Our research also revealed the narrow range of expertise of our elected decision-makers: 40 per cent of them have backgrounds in the law, education or PR, with other more practical backgrounds correspondingly under-represented. The dominance of lawyers becomes of particular relevance when we consider the question of 'evidence', which has a very different meaning in legal and scientific contexts. When a lawyer reports that 'there is no evidence that Mr Blair was at the scene of the crime', he is making a strong claim that tends to exonerate the suspect. In science the position is entirely different. When a government scientist reports to Michael Meacher that 'there is no evidence that genetically modified crops are damaging to health', he is simply stating that none of the research studies conducted have found 'significant' (in a narrow, statistical sense) answers to this question, or even that no studies have been carried out at all.

The nature of scientific evidence presented to government committees and thence to ministers is limited and biased in another way. Most of the scientific research carried out in universities today has been part-funded by industry. As a result of the Thatcherite push towards 'market-driven research' only research programmes that can eventually yield a profit are likely to be funded. So what is the university scientist to do, if s/he undertakes a research project and finds results which would undermine the product of the very company that funded the research? If, as Arpad Pusztai has identified, [3] 'the future of science lies with industry' it would take a brave, or rich, scientist to oppose industry's priorities.

Following recent concern expressed about the possible health effects of mobile phone use the Government set up the Stewart Committee, which recommended a thorough programme of research. With astonishing obtuseness, however, this research was to be funded partly by the mobile phone industry, a procedure akin to asking Bernard Matthews to investigate whether we should continue to have turkeys as the centrepiece of our Christmas meal.

An account of a recent piece of peer-reviewed research into just this issue will remove any lingering trust in the objectivity of industry-funded research. In a recent survey, published in the journal Epidemiology, the results were reported of a study of 195,775 employees of the company Motorola, who develop and manufacture mobile phone equipment. [4] The study was part-funded by Motorola and carried out by a non-university organisation Exponent Health Group. It examined all causes of mortality, with brain cancers, lymphomas and leukaemias as major a priori outcomes of interest. The study seemed to report no excess risk from any cause of death among the workers. The abstract of the results states: 'Our findings do not support an association between occupational RF exposure and brain cancer, lymphoma or leukaemia.'

However, close inspection of the paper reveals a quite different picture. The study compares mortality risk in the highly educated, upper social class, electronics workers with members of the general public in four States of the USA: Arizona, Florida, Texas and Illinois. Comparison of the death rates reveals that although the Motorola employees enjoy lower death rates (owing to their higher socio-economic status), their death rates from all causes were significantly lower than their death rates from leukaemia and lymphatic system cancers and most other cancers (but not brain cancers). The effect was particularly clear in the case of the lymphatic system cancer Hodgkin's disease, a result which was not mentioned in the abstract. If the overall mortality risk from all causes is used as an internal control for the 'healthy worker effect' there was a higher risk of dying of most cancer types. In fact, it was possible to use data reported in the paper to argue that there was a strong excess risk of most types of cancer in the workers, since standardised risk by period of employment consistently showed a 50 to 100 per cent elevated risk in those who had worked more than five years with the radiation relative to those who had worked from 0-5 years. Nothing was made of this result.

There is a great deal of scope in epidemiology for tailoring the results to fit the hypothesis. Yet the results of this mobile phone paper, and others like it, reporting studies which were funded by industry and showing results which counter any suggestion that these industries may be causing harm, are commonplace in the reference section of review committees which give advice to government. Do the committee members look through the original papers? Would they know what to look for?

To explore how and why the system of science advice is failing we examined the work of several advisory committees in detail. These unaccountable committees have been evaluated in terms of their openness and accountability by Democratic Audit. [5] The Novel Foods and Processes Committee (ACNFP) received a relatively favourable score, choosing to publish annual reports and a register of its members' interests, as well as carrying out public consultations and publishing its advice to government. However, the other committee considered here -- the Committee on the Medical Aspects of Radiation in the Environment (COMARE) scores poorly, its only concession to accountability being to publish a register of members' interests.

According to The Independent on Sunday, a majority of the members of the Advisory Committee on Novel Foods and Processes have links, either personally or institutionally, with the food industry. In an attempt to broaden the interest-base of the Committee it was agreed to appoint a 'consumer representative' last year. 'Maff rejected a sceptic on GM foods from the Consumers' Association in favour of the wife of a board member of the chemical company Boots'. [6] The Committee's independence is devastated by the information that it actually commissions no research of its own and relies mainly on information provided by biotech companies. The Committee's most recent Annual Report [7] contains no references to peer-reviewed papers: there are a mere five references, three to papers by Zeneca, the other two being publications from the Committee itself.

COMARE (the Committee on the Medical Aspects of Radiation in the Environment) was set up following a recommendation of the Black Report into the Sellafield leukaemia cluster, a tacit acknowledgement that doubts about the independence of the Government's official nuclear watchdog, the National Radiological Protection Board (NRPB), were justified. The problem is that COMARE is based at the NRPB offices at Chilton, Oxfordshire. If you phone the COMARE telephone number it is answered with 'Hello, NRPB'. What is more, the three-person secretariat that organises COMARE's agendas are all on the NRPB payroll. This point has been raised with various leading members of NRPB and the COMARE chairman as being worrying but they cannot see a problem. When asked why it was necessary for COMARE to be based at NRPB one replied that it enables members to use the NRPB library, although they are not themselves based there.

One of COMARE's three secretaries, Roy Hamlet, gives one further cause to suspect that there is, indeed, something rotten in the state of Didcot. He spends a proportion of his time conducting research for NRPB and the rest preparing paperwork for the members of COMARE, whose raison d'etre is to be independent of NRPB. We were recently amused to have copied to us a letter from the Department of Health in London advising an enquirer into radiation and health that the DoH took this area very seriously and were advised by the 'independent committee COMARE' on the effects of radiation. The letter was signed by Dr Roy Hamlet, who signed himself, Radiation Advisor, Department of Health. He does not have far to walk to get advice from the 'independent committee' since he is, himself, their secretary.

Further concern was raised after we received a leak copy of minutes of COMARE's 55th meeting, held on 18 March 1999, at which they discussed a report, by Green Audit, that there was increased cancer near those parts of the Irish Sea coast of Wales where radioisotopes from Sellafield had become concentrated. The authors of the report were not invited to the meeting, where the following extraordinary exchange took place:

7.13 Professor MacMillan asked whether it was possible to be sure that there was no coastline effect on the incidence of leukaemia. Professor Clayton also thought it would be premature to say that the coastline effect did not exist.

7.15 The chairman (Professor Bridges) asked the committee members whether they would wish to recommend a further study to test Dr Busby's hypothesis.

7.16 Dr Hamlet (COMARE secretary) said that this would raise Dr Busby's credibility and would open the door for others to lean on COMARE to recommend research.

The question here is whether the alarming possibility of increasing Dr Busby's credibility is more important than investigating what he claims to have found, even though this may save hundreds of lives, if he is right.

To counter the apparently irresistible bias towards industry in current research priorities we propose the development of a new structure of scientific advice based on the opposition principle that is so fundamental to the UK constitution. Just as in the House of Commons the Government, as protagonist, is opposed axiomatically by the Opposition, so the corporations, as developers of new processes and products, should face opposition by government scientists on behalf of the citizen. While the problems associated with an oppositional system -- especially its engendering of an antagonistic rather than co-operative policy -- have been emphasised, in recent years its main benefit has been ignored. This is the strengthening of legislation by means of a process of bombardment to identify any weaknesses. And just as in the House the most effective route to promotion for an ambitious back-bencher is to pick a sizeable hole in government legislation, so in an oppositional scientific environment, any new process or pr oduct would be subjected to a barrage of research by the young scientist eager to make her name. This would guarantee the genuine scrutiny of technological advance that the effete committees of eminent academics have so clearly failed to provide. Under the new structure government advisory committees act as referees between the evidence provided by the corporations, on the one side, and the counter evidence provided by government-funded independent scientists on the other.

It is apparent that such a system will be successful only if it is provided with research from both sides of any debate. At present research, much of it part-funded by industry and part by our taxes, is biased in favour of industry. We propose the abandonment of such joint funding arrangements. The money that we provide towards scientific research should fund independent scientists whose objective is to protect our interests and our health. We propose the creation of a new position of 'citizen scientist'.

The combination of increasing teaching pressure and corporation funding has undermined the ability of the academic to carry out powerful and independent research. By contrast, the citizen scientists would be funded by public money to do just that. They could continue in their own university, or even work outside the university structure altogether, but compete with each other for fixed-term government-funded contracts within designated areas of public concern. They would then be required to produce and publish research and to provide information and advice to ministers and expert committees.

In a country which enjoyed the benefits of responsibility and accountability amongst its decision-makers, those who caused the deaths of 53 people through their negligence could be identified and should be tried for manslaughter. In this country, not only has nobody been punished for this appalling tragedy, but the system that allowed it to occur remains unchanged. Worse still, it appears that it is allowing precisely the same mistakes to occur in the potentially more widespread and damaging arena of genetic manipulation of crops. The people have learnt: they no longer trust scientists or politicians. But politicians appear to have learnt nothing. Unlike Pilate they do not ask 'What is Truth?', but blindly follow the advice of their civil servants and scientific advisers. The BSE tragedy proves that in this debate the stakes are high. It is time public money was invested in defending public health against the onslaught from those who seek private profits.

Molly Scott Cato is a researcher with Green Audit, an independent environmental consultancy. Her publications include Seven Myths About Work (1997) and Green Economics: Beyond Supply and Demand to Meeting People's Needs (1999; co-edited with Miriam Kennett). I Don't Know Much About Science: Political Decision-Making Involving Science and Technology (published May 2000, ISBN: 1-897761-21-X, [pound]5) is available from Green Audit or by order from any bookshop.

(1.) A Travis (1999), 'Scientists Take Flak over Food Scares', Guardian, 8 June.

(2.) Panorama, BBC TV, 27 March 2000.

(3.) A Pusztai (2000), 'Academic Freedom: Is It Dying Out?', The Ecologist, 30/2: 26-9.

(4.) RW Morgan, MA Kelsh, K Ke Zhao, A Exuzides, S Heringer, and W Negrete, (2000), 'Radiofrequency Exposure and Mortality from Cancer of the Brain and Lymphatic/Hematopoietic System', Epidemiolagy, 11/2: 118-27.

(5.) S Weir, and D Beetham, (1999), Political Power and Democratic Control in Britain: The Democratic Audit of the United Kingdom (London: Routledge).

(6.) G Lean, (1999), 'Government shifts ground', Independent on Sunday, 21 Feb.

(7.) Advisory Committee on Novel Foods and Processes (1997), Annual Report 1997 (London: Ministry of Agriculture Fisheries and Food/Department of Health).

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